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[supersymmetry]

It's nighttime, and Fred is in her room. She's been reading for a few hours -- more than a few, really. She tends to get lost in her own world so easily that she'd barely realized that it was late.

When she does realize, she only takes the time to shower and change into pajamas, not taking very much notice that she's done so. After all, it is not as though she has anyone to impress.

That thought makes her frown slightly without realizing that she's thinking about Wesley, vaguely wondering where he is, perhaps thinking briefly of wandering down to his room to say goodnight. Things had been good, but slightly strained, she thought. The strange situation had been so odd that it was a wonder they'd managed to find their bearings at all. So they tended to give each other a bit of distance now, never really having fallen into the ease of interaction that she'd shared with Gunn.

Stop that, it's not fair to compare.

Of course it wasn't, and she didn't compare them, not really. This place was perhaps less conducive to relationships than their old job had been.

All of these thoughts cross her mind as she turns the pages of her book, a volume on the theories of interdimensional spaces, but she soon finds herself absorbed in the pages too completely to think of anything else but the text.

Comments

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

...Until there's a quiet knock at the door...

Wes woke up a bit disoriented to find more than a day had passed. Apparently time in the bar could be a fluid thing at times. Something else worth studying perhaps.

But for the moment, his first thought was to come check in on Fred. There had been a distance lately, but the passing of a few days.... Well.

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The knock doesn't precisely startle her, though it does cause her to lose her place in the book as she hurries to answer the door.

"Hey." she greets him warmly. "Come on in. Your timing is perfect, I was just wondering what you'd been up to."

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

He greets her back just as warmly, the recent distance forgotten for a moment at least.

Wes smiles. "Traveling through time, apparently. I seem to have lost a couple of days. Does that happen here usually?"

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Fred shrugs.

"Don't ask me, I never knew what day it was back when I lived somewhere that obeyed most of the laws of physics. This place is weird in more ways than I can keep up with."

She picks her book up off the bed.

"I've just been reading. You know, you can get any book here? I bet the bar could give you those magical books that could be anything, except it wouldn't need to, because it can already give you anything. It makes it especially easy for those days when I just cannot deal with being down there with all the crazy."

Something about her is much more reminiscent of the way she'd been when she first got out of Pylea, but she doesn't notice it, herself. It's just how she deals with situations that defy logic. She retreats, without even knowing she's doing so.

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

Wesley remembers those days all too well, but he can hardly blame her for reacting to the place that way. He's been here less than a month and still finds it overwhelming at times.

"I hadn't thought to ask the bar for anything like that. I wonder if she would have access to the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Worth a try, I suppose."

That distracts Wes, so there's a few moments of the two of them staring aimlessly into different points in space.

Wes snaps back. "What have you been reading?"

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"Oh, it's um... nothing of much interest, really. Not even originally from our world, as far as I can tell." she says, somehow feeling nervous about telling anyone about this book in particular, though she didn't know why.

"It's just some stuff about interdimensional spaces, places out of time, like this one. I spent my entire first week here trying to figure out what made this place work, and I guess I'm still doing that, but this one's barely even in English." she says, with a sheepish look.

She doesn't notice, but she's absently tugging at her pajama top, as if to cover the faint marks that just peek out along the edges of her collarbone if one looks very closely.

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

Wesley can't help but notice the marks.

"Fred, what--." And then he realizes they're burn marks.

Alarmed, he steps closer to her. "Are you all right? What's happened?"

Forgetting himself, he reaches up and pulls the pajama top, exposing the burn, oblivious to what he's doing in his concern about her safety.

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Fred lets out a little yelp of surprise and pulls away from him, her hands automatically going to cover the marks that are now safely re-hidden under her shirt.

"Fine, it's nothing, I'm fine!" she insists, flustered, and sounding almost angry. "Really, just... I can't explain. Just leave it. I can't."

She's inched back away from him to sit in the middle of the bed, her legs tucked up under her in an attempt to make herself smaller, perhaps invisible.

It's just Wesley, for heaven's sake. He didn't mean... why are you acting like a terrified child?

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

Which, of course, is just what Fred ought to do ... if she wants to make Wesley truly worried.

"Fred--. It's not nothing, surely." He walks to the edge of her bed. He wants to reach out to her, but her resistance is palpable, keeping him at a distance. And once again, Wesley finds himself yearning to help her, and restrained from doing anything about it.

"Have you been to the infirmary, at least? I've met one of the doctors here. They seem quite competent. And burns--you should have them looked at."

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She gives him a look.

"I told you, it's fine. This wouldn't even have gotten me the afternoon off from work back at home."

Which was probably true, given who they worked for.

Some part of her mind realizes that she is being unreasonable, and so her tone softens slightly.

"I'm sorry, I know I should have gotten it looked at, but it honestly wasn't that bad, and it's healing properly. Honestly. It's not the injury itself that's freaking me out. It's..." she hesitates, biting her lip. "... I can't do this, you're just going to worry and when you worry you look at me like you're looking at me right now, like poor Fred who can't keep herself out of danger and I just can't deal with that right now, okay?"

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

Wesley's expression shifts for a moment to a look of, What am I supposed to do?

"I worry because--. It's not because I don't respect you, Fred."

So much easier to say why he doesn't worry than why he does.

"Can you at least tell me what happened?"

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"...no." she says, after a pause that seems, to her, excruciatingly long.

"But not because I don't want to!" she hastily adds. "I would, it's just that I, um...I don't exactly remember."

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

"Fred..."

He says only her name, but behind it is the years they spent around each other. And, for all too short a time, with each other. And the respect he has for her intelligence and her spirit. That same respect that makes it impossible for him to believe she can't truly remember something like this, even if some of the details may not be entirely clear.

And somewhere, behind all that, at a depth even he won't acknowledge, Wesley is sensing something else. Some part of what she's concealing. A character trait he knows too well now. One that had great and grievous consequence for her. And for him.

[supersymmetry]

She frowns slightly and chews her lip some more.

"Okay. You want to know? Of course you want to know, you're Wesley."

She can't help but smile slightly at this, as she reaches over to retrieve a notebook from the bedside table's drawer.
She flips through a few pages until she comes to one that is covered in drawings of this symbol, which she then hands over to Wesley.

"That's the symbol that's burned into my chest. I don't know what it is, or what it means. I don't even know where to start looking. All I know is that one minute I was having a conversation with this woman, she was a scholar, a physicist, and she knew more than I do, more than anyone in our time does. She offered to let me see her library, and she could get me out of the bar, so... I went."

She pauses just long enough to take a breath, because if she stops now she's never going to finish explaining.

"And I don't remember what happened, but I think I went with her. Something happened in her world, or wherever she took me, but I don't know if she hurt me or if something just... happened. All I know is that suddenly I was in the bar again and it hurt and I didn't know why or what had done it, and I was frazzled and confused and I ran back here and didn't tell anybody anything, and then you were here right after, so..." she trails off.

"I didn't want you to worry."

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

Wesley comes very, very close to laughing. A dark, horrible laugh. But instead, he keeps that laugh inside, shoves it deep, down where it's been poisoning his spirit for what now seems like ages.

(She was curious.... How things work. What makes them special. She was always searching for what other people couldn't see.)

"She offered to show you her ... library...."

(She was just curious. I think I hate her a little for that.)

And then the laugh comes. It starts low, and quiet. And there can be no question of him laughing at Fred. No, this is a laugh at Fate, and how perfectly this incident foreshadows what's to come.

And only now does Wesley realize that he's been allowing himself to hope. Ever since he came to this place, to hope that this Fred was different. That somehow the both of them being here--Fred andIllyria--meant that somehow this Fred would not leave him, not die.

But, of course, that's not true. Her fate is sealed. Perhaps on every world, in every reality. The Truth, the Power of Illyria was not to be denied. Not on a single world, not on a single Earth.

And perhaps there is a Wesley too on every one of those worlds. The Fool, whose sole purpose, his only real reason for existing, is to be the chief observer to the rebirth of a Goddess.

An august office really. He can't say Fate didn't find a lofty place for him in the Grand Plan.

And that just makes him laugh all the more, as he slumps to the floor, beside her bed.

[supersymmetry]

"...Wesley?" she says his name in an incredulous tone, unable to even use the fond shortened version that she normally would have.

"Can you maybe react a little better to this? You asked, you wanted to know, I knew it wasn't a good idea because this? This is exactly what I was afraid of."

She sounds more than a little angry right now, mostly because she's scared of his reaction.

"What was I supposed to do? Can you tell me that? I was trapped here for months, I couldn't leave, I couldn't go back home even if Bar would let me out, and I'm trapped here with a freakish blue version of me who knows my every thought and who occasionally sees fit to yell at me for endangering her future body. So someone nice and mostly normal comes along and offers to let me look at books. Just BOOKS, not demon specimens or robot ninjas or ghost vampires or evil puppets! What else was I supposed to do?"

She sounds very near to tears by the end of her long tirade.

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

The laughter scares him too. It's the outward sign of a madness he may not be able to control someday.

But today is not that day. And the laughter soon subsides to a still silence in the room.

He forces himself to look up at her, and then slowly rise to his feet.

"I'm sorry," his voice a quiet monotone. "You're quite right, of course. I'm not helping."

Wesley wasn't always able to do this. To bind his heart in chains. But they're back in place, where they almost feel natural.

"You've been here longer than I have. I should have considered that: how difficult it would be to be trapped here for some time. I'm sorry, Fred. It was wrong of me to--. I'm sorry."

[supersymmetry]

Her rant over, now she feels regretful, as well.

"Don't be sorry. You have a right to be concerned. I would be."

She sighs, and stands as well, taking a step forward to bridge the distance between them and then taking his hands in her own, forcing some contact between them to anchor them both to this reality, no matter how strange it was.

"The truth is that every day here I am terrified, and nobody ever sees it. I'm scared to death both of staying here any longer, and of what's waiting for me if that door ever opens and I'm somehow forced to go back through. I'm worried that when the day comes they won't have to force me because I'll be so tired of this place that I'll take my chances against her.

She's faintly trembling now, because this is the most honest she's ever been about what she actually thinks of this place.

[dark-ex-watcher.livejournal.com]

"Well. Then perhaps no one can blame either of us," Wes whispers.

And he closes the rest of the distance between them. Gently embracing her, careful not to press against her burns. He simply holds her, trying to make the trembling go away.

Because Wesley knows how fleeting moments like this really are. They shouldn't be here at all, really. Not together again. And the irony of Fred seeing him this way, the way he is after--no, because of--her death, is so cosmically absurd, he has no business worrying her with it.

He should instead be grateful, if he can. Grateful for these moments which Fate--perhaps, after all, merciful, in its way--has given them both to share a little longer.